'Community hatred' may lead to social revolution
JAKARTA (JP): Community distrust and hatred of corrupt officials has the potential to cause the widely feared social revolution, an economist and party executive said.
Economist Faisal Basri, who is also secretary-general of the National Mandate Party (PAN), said on Monday that corruption "fosters seeds of hatred" which may suddenly explode.
"Corruption from the upper to lower levels of bureaucracy creates inefficiency and a high cost of living for the people," he said.
He was addressing a five-day session of training for activists involved in the campaign to help raise public awareness of various forms of official misconduct. The session was held by the Indonesian Anti-Corruption Forum, which was made up by several groups including the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), the Indonesian Transparency Society (MTI), the Indonesian Environment Forum (Walhi) and the Movement of Concerned Citizens on State Assets (Gempita).
The 48 participants included activists, officials, journalists, and representatives of political parties, students and the private sector.
According to Faisal, three things are needed to eliminate corruption: a clear and rigid legal system, a restructured bureaucracy and an active anti-corruption campaign.
Faisal also mentioned the danger posed by corrupt money politics leading up to the June 7 polls.
"Even now the National Mandate Party is crowded with party executives who use money to gain support. This is crazy. Amien Rais (chairman of PAN) was offered a great deal of money by the Cendana family," he said, referring to the Central Jakarta residence of former president Soeharto.
"We have to fight this alone. This is very hard but we must try to be consistent. The future National Election Committee must draw up a regulation on this."
He said that a member of a corruption watchdog almost bribed officials to get data of the Timor national car project.
Faisal and Walhi chairwoman Emmy Hafild said corruption was rooted in business practices here.
"The long-preserved pattern of business patronage gives wide opportunity for officials to take advantage of their positions by exchanging services for material payments from interested business people," Faisal said.
He cited examples of petty corruption, such as bribery involved in the making of identification cards and other services illegally given by low ranking members of the bureaucracy.
"The issue of identification cards appears trivial; it is a habit among people to grease the bureaucratic wheels," Faisal said.
Corruption on a larger scale, he added, was difficult to uncover given the higher education of officials involved and the wide spread of corruption.
He referred to a few cases, including the Golden Key Group scandal involving credit of Rp 1.3 trillion. Eddy Tansil, convicted for the corruption case, escaped from jail and was recently reported to be living in China.
Citing the case of forest management, Emmy said, "There are at least 14 points of corruption in forest concessions, starting from the way interested businessmen must look for preliminary information, recommendations from related departments, the conducting of surveys up to paying monitoring officials.
"How can a forest supervisor fulfill his duty if he is paid by the company which runs the forest concession?"
Organizers said that after the information session, participants would hopefully design methods to curb the spread of corruption in accordance with conditions in the country.
Among those to address the training program are representatives of Transparency International Australia, Transparency International Malaysia and the Australia-based Independent Commission Against Corruption. (edt)